Learning how to efficiently read like a humanities graduate student is a life skill.

When I first entered my humanities master’s degree, I had no idea how to read the massive pile of books we’d just been assigned the first week. I was in an interdisciplinary program, which meant I was taking on a mix of history, comparative literature, and political science, and everything we were reading across the course of the program was reflective of the hybridity of the world and across disciplines.

And there was another massive challenge coming my way: I was a first generation college student going on to get a master’s degree.

No one else in my family had done a master’s, and while my sister had gotten her advanced degree and became a pharmacist, she didn’t know how to do the humanities. She was strictly a STEM student all throughout her undergrad and graduate career.

Which meant I was completely in the dark starting this program, but, if we’re going to be honest, this teaches you to be more resilient. Sure, you’re behind compared to your uppity peers who had these opportunities and connections, but when a challenge is thrown your way, you solve it versus having a mental breakdown.

Anyways, one of the many skills I acquired was knowing how to read a book like a graduate student. I’ve gotten really good at it, so here are some of my tips for fellow budding scholars!

Trust me, don’t read everything.

In a history course, you’re probably given upwards to five hundred pages a week to read. Considering everything else you need to do with your academic life, you’re not going to have time to do everything, read every word, and understand what exactly is on the page.

My first semester I took a course on decolonization and postcolonialism through the slant of indigenous history in the United States, and the professor warned us that we should not be reading every single word on the page. Get to the point.

And that’s the heart of knowing your limits as a human being and an academic. You’re going to know what you’re researching going into a text and what you want to get at, so understand this and skim the work.

Reading the entire book might take you days otherwise, and a good chunk of the information presented within it will end up burning you out pretty quickly.

The biggest tip is to read the introduction or abstract first. Extrapolate the information you need, such as the argument, and what might be the the core of the evidence they’re using to back up their claim.

Then, if a chapter in the book isn’t even relevant for what you need to do, you might have the chance to skip it. I was reading a book on Kashmir recently for my nationalism course, and I skipped entire chapters because I solely needed contemporary events.

Purchase a book stand or find a way to prop your texts up.

My neck hurts a lot when I have to look down too often, so one of the big purchases I’ve made recently is a stand for textbooks. Granted, the academic books I’m checking out in the library aren’t as big or heavy as a textbook is, but I simply can’t be hunched over a book while I’m taking notes.

The stand I bought props open the book at an angle, so I can glance back and forth between the book and the laptop/desktop I’m taking notes on at the time.

This has honestly expedited my process as well, because I no longer am also trying to keep the book open with my wrists or hands while I’m taking notes. I think I work better with hard copies and note taking because I don’t typically have two monitors, which means I would have to toggle back and forth between two tabs on a tiny laptop screen.

When you’re on limited time, you need to get through all of these books as best as you can without making it harder on yourself.

Make connections between texts.

This is absolutely critical as a beginning graduate student. You need to be able to bring together all of these texts in a comprehensive manner, but you shouldn’t have to have a thesis pinned down from the very beginning.

For example, I’ve been taking an independent study in colonial Korean women’s literature, and it’s a mix of art history, standard history, and literature.

It’s been a lot of readings so far, but I only just had my breakthrough when it came to the arguments I wanted to make in the end. I had to pick up a rare text through interlibrary loan, have it shipped all the way from Delaware, and then while I was reading it I had the eureka moment.

Before then, I was scrambling to find solid theories to ground together all of what I was reading. I was reading these short stories by different women writers and not understanding their connection beyond the standard nationalist and “women need to get educated” slant, and then I realized a lot of the papers I’d been reading were approaching this from the standard history slant.

No one was really writing extensively in English on literary theories and what was guiding them, to this text I had checked out made a breakthrough for me because it created some glue to bind together all of these books and articles.

Weed through the theory to guide your readings.

This seriously ties with my last heading and paragraphs, but you need to be able to understand theories before you begin proposing your own original ideas. Theories can help you shape an argument or even argue against what the original person is proposing, suggesting that if you look at this from a different angle, then we’d be able to sit down and have further conversations about what has already been suggested.

For example, I had to read Freire, Fanon, and Cesaire during my first semester of graduate school, and those three theorists have been critical for another course I’m taking on the literature of the Atlantic Slave Trade and forced migration.

We’re reading other theorists in this class, but because I had the knowledge of the other three, I’ve been able to make some deeper connections in my own world about what I actually want to say and argue.

Without the needed context, a lot of these pieces are just information. You need methodologies to your research to guide it, and that becomes part of the glue that ultimately becomes a paper and the argument/why of you’re doing this research.

Theory is difficult, but it is definitely necessary.

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